In Doom Eternal, the Doom Slayer isn’t just ripping apart demons, he’s tearing down FPS limits too. With a newly optimized engine, id Software has found the upcoming sequel maxes out at an audacious 1000 frames-per-second.
In a new featurette from IGN, id Software lead engine programmer Billy Khan breaks down some of the tech that Doom Eternal was developed with, focusing on id Tech 7, the latest version of id’s hallmark engine. Essentially, id Tech 7 has allowed the team to maximize the game in a way that wasn’t possible with id Tech 6.
“This game, if you have the hardware right, it could hit 1000 frames-per-second, that’s the max we have,” Khan says. “There’s really no upper limit. I’ve had some hardware that we built locally just for testing and we had scenes running at 400 frames-per-second.” He adds that this not only makes Eternal impressive in the here and now, it future-proofs the sequel for years to come: “Going forward this game will hold up for many years, and give you really amazing opportunities to leverage that hardware.” So, probably not going to be running this on a McDonald’s cash register, then.
It’s been no secret that id Software is confident in what Doom Eternal has to offer. As our Richard Scott-Jones mentions in his glowing preview, studio director Marty Stratton is on record as saying this is the best game id has ever made.
No doubt this spruced-up tech will inspire modders of Doom 2016, which recently got a ray tracing mod that makes it more photorealistic. Never too much detail when it comes to demon decapitation.
Doom Eternal launches March 20. If you want a Doom fix right this second for completely free, you can play the original in your browser.